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Amazon Reveals "Prime Air", Their Plans For 30-minute Deliveries By Drone
Z80xxc! writes "Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos revealed during a CBS 60 Minutes interview that the company is working on a service called 'Prime Air' to deliver packages by autonomous octocopter drones within 30 minutes of hitting the 'buy' button. The plan still requires more testing and FAA approval, but Bezos predicts it'll be available to the public in the next 4-5 years.
With a lot of backlash against drones, and some towns even offering bounties to shoot them down, will this technology ever take off, or is this just another one of Amazon's eccentric CEO's fantastical flight ideas?"
For the uninitiated, that's marketingese for "we have no fucking clue."
Hate to break it to you, but the only aircraft that have to meet the safety standards that Boeing and Airbus meet are those running published airline routes.
The news helicopter flying overhead is regulated to a lower standard. The private jet carrying some CEO across the country is regulated to a lower standard. Larry Elison flying his own personal jet is regulated to an even lower standard still, and the guy buzzing over your house in the plane he built himself is regulated to the lowest standard of all.
That said, there are standards, and the FAA has standards for drones as well. The level of rigor largely depends on:
1. How heavy the plane is (a little RC aircraft might give your kid a cut if it crashed into them, a cessna would squish them like a bug).
2. Whether the operation is recreational or commercial (flying is expensive, so not too many people are put at risk if their free airplane ride is a bit risky - but self-sustaining operations are a different story).
3. Whether a commercial operation involves an airline route (if the CEO is paying for the plane he is riding on, chances are he's going to not be cheap on the maintenance budget - when you just buy a plane ticket you're at the mercy of the megacorp maintaining the plane).
For the most part commercial operations tend to be much safer than flying, and recreational operations tend to be about as safe as riding a motorcycle - more hazardous than a car, but not outside the realm of normal activity. Planes by their very nature tend to be fairly light, so their damage potential for those not in the cabin is actually pretty low when compared to the analogous ground-based activity (cars, trucks, trains, freighters, etc).
I'm sure the FAA would consider this a commercial operation and regulate it accordingly. Right now the regulations are actually so tight that anything but experimental/developmental use is impractical (usually you have to have human operators able to take manual control, observers watching the drone, etc). I imagine that they'll only remove the leash when somebody comes up with a system that is fairly robust. Besides, a drone capable of carrying a package any distance is going to be expensive - you wouldn't just want to be losing them due to failures all the time.